People were watching the news on a screen long before anyone owned a television. In the early 1900s, cinemas began showing short newsreels before the main feature. The French company Pathé started one of the first regular series in 1908.
A newsreel ran a few minutes and covered a handful of stories: a royal visit, a flood, a boxing match, a war. There was no live coverage. Film had to be shot, developed, cut and shipped to theaters, so the news you saw was days old.
Television took the job
Through the 1950s and 60s, television news took over. It was faster, it was free at home, and it didn’t need a cinema ticket. Newsreels faded out, and their archives ended up as historical footage in documentaries.
Those archives are still useful. They show what audiences were told, and what they were shown, at the time. Often that’s very different from what historians say later.
The feed changed the timing again
Now a clip can be filmed, uploaded and watched in minutes. That’s faster than any newsreel ever managed. It’s also much easier to fake, to strip of context or to recycle from another year.
The basic problem hasn’t changed. Someone chooses what you see, and you should know who.